Berber & Q, Haggerston

As East London gentrifies and rents go up, the innovators and risk-takers get pushed further out into the suburbs. Only a few years ago Shoreditch was the buzzing heart of the London restaurant revolution, where the Young Turks served modern British tasting menus in a speakeasy above a Spitalfields pub and Abiye Cole sold his Big Apple Hot Dogs outside the fire station on Old Street. Now, Big Apple are a feature of menus across the capital and Isaac McHale has a Michelin star.

And I'm a huge fan of both and good luck to them of course, but while Shoreditch settles into its role as the New Soho, something stirs in Haggerston. In a old railway arch (the East London trendy restaurant venue du jour), candle-lit and cacophonic, is Berber & Q, who at first glance are ticking so many off the hipster-restaurant checklist (men with fancy facial hair shaking cocktails, craft beer, sharing plates) it threatens to collapse into parody. But fortunately, the food they're serving is anything but clichéd; in fact I'd go so far as to say it's the most exciting new restaurant since you could get a pint on Curtain Road for under £4.50. Which was a very long time ago.

Without wanting to trivialise the extraordinary work of the kitchen staff at Berber & Q, an easy shortcut to describe what they're doing is probably a "Lebanese Smoking Goat". Which is to say they've taken all the best flavours and spices of a certain cuisine (in this case Middle Eastern/North African) and matched it with modern low'n'slow smoking techniques and an energetic youthful service. A good example of this is the short-rib, meltingly tender like the finest Pitt Cue examples yet boosted by a date syrup glaze which lends the whole thing an extra level of exotic Eastern promise.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First came a beautiful plate of chunky house hummus, studded with marinated chickpeas and pine nuts and dressed with half a soft(ish) boiled egg. Alongside that, creme fraiche with harissa oil and crushed tomato. Familiar ingredients perhaps to anyone with a passing interest in Middle Eastern food, but as you can hopefully see even from my rubbish iPhone pictures, there's a certain rustic style and confidence here you don't find in your average Edgware Road joint. Oh and the house pitta is fresh from the oven, soft and thick and instantly making a complete mockery of anywhere serving those horrid dry flat-pack things that smell of glue.

From here on, we moved from the (relative) light of the bar area to a dark table by the wall, with a predictable spike in the hideousness of my photography, so please just imagine these dark splodges look like food. Smoked beans, lamb neck and crisp onion had that dense, oily meatiness of a kind of Boston baked beans, only one from the Levant. With the fireworks elsewhere on the menu this is a dish that runs the risk of being forgotten, but everything that's good about Berber & Q go about things is present in this little bowl of smoked beans and silky, fatty lamb. It was glorious.

Grilled asparagus with mustard seeds were good as you might expect, only is seared into my memory for re-introducing me to toum, a startling garlic sauce so strong it burned like chilli in the mouth. And like the best chilli sauces, it was incredibly addictive; I'd like to apologise now to my Uber driver that night, the journey to Battersea can't have been pleasant.

Blackened aubergine "salad" was a single (large) aubergine, halved and grilled, and dressed with garlic yoghurt, tomato pulp and fresh herbs. I usually hate aubergine but even I could appreciate this.

Highlight of all the excellent vegetable dishes though was the cauliflower. Berber & Q keep theirs in a rack above the main charcoal grill so that the smoke and flavour from whatever's being cooked below infuses into the vegetables above. Roasted to the point of crunchy & carbonised, then dressed with a myriad of exotic herbs and spices including pomegranete seeds, flowers and tahini, this was probably my favourite dish of all, and this on a menu that contains chicken wings.

Oh yes, almost forgot, the meat. All of the "meat" section of the menu is presented on one tray, alongside spiced salt, harissa, pickles and all sorts of extra grilled vegetables and fresh herbs. For the pulled lamb (Mechoui) we were instructed to wrap up the meat in a lettuce leaf with some salt and harissa, and very good it was too. Harissa chicken wings were plump and had a fantastic crisp skin, but seemed to suffer from weak bones - I found more than one that had shattered, revealing unpleasant brown marrow.

Oddly though, for a (sort of) BBQ restaurant, and even more oddly for a Middle Eastern joint, the meat wasn't really the main event. Far more exciting to me were the salads and grilled vegetables that seemed to be firing off in even more exciting and unexpected places with each new dish that arrived. The short ribs and wings were excellent, no doubt, but thanks to Pitt Cue and Smokehouse we've already seen those. What we've not seen - at least I haven't - is a menu that treats vegetables with equal, in fact you could argue more, reverence, to the extent that if the meat section was removed entirely (lovely though they are) I doubt you'd miss them at all.

There's plenty more to talk about - I've only mentioned about half the menu, and haven't even touched on the cocktails - but you will have seen where this is going so I'll let you discover the rest yourself. Because if there's one thing you need to do it's get in the 'Q at Berber; food like this can be enjoyed by anyone and deserves to be eaten by everyone. It's a confident rebuttal to anyone who's dared say they were tired of London's restaurants, their lack of originality, their lack of confidence. I've seen the future, and it's blackened over charcoal and doused in toum and hiding in a dark railway arch in Haggerston.

9/10

I was invited to Berber & Q initially, but liked it so much I went back the very next day and paid for it. Hence the bill from day 2 (above) not matching the dishes we ate on day 1. Anyway who cares, just go, you'll love it. And if the queue's too big, use my app to find somewhere else amazing.

Dalila, Battersea

EDIT 29/03/16: I don't know what in holy hell has happened since this review, but a recent delivery from Dalila was so catastrophically inedible I felt the need to put a disclaimer in here in case anyone else is tempted to try it. Avoid like the plague.

After Arabica reminded me just how good food from the Levant could be, even if it was at the expense of that month's salary, I was in the mood for a nice big Lebanese lunch where portions weren't measured by the teaspoon and where I might feel I'd got my money's worth.

Most Lebanese (I realise there's a bit of crossover with various different countries' cuisines - Syrian, Israeli, Palestinian, but I'm going to stick with calling it Lebanese because I don't know any better) food I've tried has all been of a solid minimum standard; maybe Middle Eastern chefs are all trained very well, or maybe it's just difficult to mess up hummus and tabouleh. Either way, while the service in a number of flashy Edgware Road Maroush joints has been less than brilliant (I've walked out before eating anything more than once), what's on the plate, when it finally arrives, is generally hard to fault.

So what happens when decent, fresh Lebanese food is served with a smile, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg? Well, you have a bloody good time, that's what happens. And so it is at Dalila, latest occupant of one of those Sites of Death that appear to host a different restaurant every year (even I've reviewed the building twice before; once as the Food Room and once as Tom Ilic) but who deserve to stick around because everything they do is well worth the money they're asking.

"Hummus Beiruty" contained chili and garlic and was impossible not to like, especially scooped up in the fresh house flatbreads. Even the nibbles had a bit of extra something to them, powerfully-flavoured olives spiked with pickles and fresh parsley.

Foul Moudamas is not a name that crosses the language barrier very successfully, but was the very opposite of foul, being piping hot beans served in a salty, citrusy olive oil mixture.

Lamb kebbeh (four for £5.50, now that's value) were also fresh out of the fryer and packed full of dense, almost offaly mince.

Tabouleh works and fails on the strength of the freshness of its ingredients, and again here we were in safe hands - crunchy, bright-green, freshly-shredded parsley studded with onions and cracked wheat.

You'll notice my descriptions of the dishes we had at Dalila are rather sparse; the fact is, much like the best Italian restaurants, the serving of lovely fresh ingredients as simply as possible leaves you with a fantastic meal but very little detail to obsess over. Which can only be a good thing. Here are slices of kellaj cheese, flatbreads stuffed with halloumi, red chilli and thyme.

The marinade on these grilled chicken wings was quite something - complex and herby, held together by a healthy glaze of lemon juice. There was a bright-white garlic dip to accompany them, all of it just threatening to tip over into overseasoning but not quite.

Samke harra was charcoal-grilled white fish in a tomato/pepper sauce, and I'm afraid as I didn't get to try any of it I'm not going to be of much use to you describing what it was like. There was none of it left by the end of the meal though so it was probably as good as everything else.

In all frank, objective honesty Dalila isn't the very best Middle Eastern restaurant I've ever been to; that is still the brilliant Al Waha, whose menu of sweetbreads, raw lamb and batrakh (fish roe) is just that more exciting and exotic. But one man's "safe" is another man's "reliable" and by not reinventing the wheel and serving familiar Lebanese favourites with such easy charm (our waiter didn't exactly have a difficult job serving us, the only customers midday on Sunday, but he was still exceptional) they will, I hope, make a success of this tricky location and become a new local favourite. And I say that with only the most selfish of intentions - it's ten minutes' walk from my house. My, my, my, Dalila.

7/10

Arabica, Borough Market

Running a restaurant, I imagine (and I'm not exactly talking from a position of much authority) involves mastering a difficult and delicate equilibrium in a number of competing factors. Cost/quality of ingredients, number/experience of staff, markups, number of dishes offered, reservations policy, décor, even opening hours - get anything too far wrong and you'll lose money no matter how noble your intentions and no matter how good the food is coming out of your kitchens. Even thinking about how difficult it must be getting the balance right makes me shudder. I could never be a restuarateur; I don't have the patience, the energy or the way with people. No, I'd much rather sit at home bitching about someone else getting it slightly wrong, given the option.

But though I try and sympathise as much as I can with those with the difficult job of running a successful restaurant, it's still deeply frustrating seeing somewhere like Arabica, which hits the nail on the head in so many different ways, tripping up so dramatically in one regard it threatens to derail the whole operation. It's frustrating because I wanted to enjoy Arabica, and there are some astonishingly talented people working there, and they so nearly had it right.

Let's start with the good news, and there is plenty of that. This attractive, airy space in Borough Market has been designed by someone who knows exactly what they're doing. There's a good mix between casual spots at the bar, taller tables next to cantilevered patio doors, well-spaced tables in the main room and a couple of cozy booths; something for everyone in other words. Staff are pleasant, attentive and know the menu well. And the vast menu reads like a dream - there are Levantine favourites like fattoush, kibbeh and falafel, but also more unusual options like pickled sardines (in fact there's a whole raw/cured section), frog legs and beef & bone marrow kofta.

So far, so good. I would, I think, have happily eaten everything on offer but advised to choose 3 dishes each (this seems to be the Thing these days) we ended up with six spread across as many different categories as we could, and some house pickles.

First up was "moutabel". Smoked aubergine and tahini spiked with garlic, it was a thoroughly enjoyable play of gentle smoked vegetables and exotic spicing, and the flatbread it came with was straight out of the clay oven and steaming hot. So, you can't fault their technique. What you can fault is that this miniscule portion, served on one of those 3.5" plates you'd normally use for spent olive stones and containing hardly more than a tablespoon of mixture, was £6. Even the flatbread was barely more than saucer-sized.

House pickles saved on the same sized plate were £3.50 for about ten bits, but were - admittedly - some of the best pickles I've had ever. It's a bit difficult to describe exactly why they were so successful, the best pickles are always something of an enigma, but they had none of that cloying sweetness that you sometimes get from house-made efforts and an arresting zing from - I'm guessing - incredibly good vinegar. They also all had a good firm crunch. Just lovely, and at even £1 less a portion they would have been unimpeachable.

Sardines took the "great food, tiny portions" theme and ran with it even further. For £6.50, again on that 3.5" plate, was three thin half-fillets of sardines, salad and dressing. Again, just wonderful to eat but barely more than a mouthful. And how much really are sardines? It's not like they were dunked in caviar.

Hake "sayadieh" (pan fried with rice and tahini) was really the only dish where the cooking itself could be faulted. The fish was mushy in parts and rather underseasoned, and though the mix of textures was interesting, overall this didn't set the pulse racing. A tenner for a 1.5" square of fillet, too...

While the quail was marked on the menu at £12.50, when the bill arrived it was down as £10 which is at least vaguely approaching value. It was very nice; a rich, crisp skin, moist flesh and I loved the little crunchy bits of fried garlic. But I can't help remembering a similarly lovely chargrilled whole quail at my local Vietnamese Mien Tay for £6.20. I mean it probably wasn't from some smallholding in Norfolk like this one was, but I'm not sure anyone could tell the difference either way.

Chicken wings (four for £7) again moved notionally closer to value without ever quite managing it. The marinade was citrussy and summery, the chicken cooked perfectly with a good crisp skin, and the spiced yoghurt a lovely counterpoint. Perhaps you're paying for the Label Anglais chicken they allegedly use, but again, under all this marinade I doubt a cheaper main ingredient would have really tasted much different.

Finally, "shankleash", a cheese salad with tomato, onion and olive oil, a couple of spoonfuls of which cost £6. I'm sure better people than me could tell the difference between this and any other feta, cherry tomato and onion salad but, well, I couldn't.

In the end, I didn't hate Arabica. It's impossible to hate Lebanese food even when it's only fairly competently made, and in the hands of the clearly very talented kitchen here it very often shines. But I wonder why, when the powers that be decided to spread a tablespoon of smoked aubergine on doll's house tableware and charge £6 for it, nobody felt compelled to say "hang on, do you not think that just looks like an utterly ridiculous amount of food to serve to paying customers?". With a couple of beers and a couple of lemonades the bill came to £72. When I got home, I made myself a toasted cheese sandwich.

5/10

Anissa's Nose to Tail Lamb at the Dock Kitchen, Notting Hill

If I was feeling slightly less than charitable, this post would be about Colchis, a Georgian restaurant in Bayswater. I went with a couple of friends on Sunday and suffered the kind of incompetence that makes the job of writing it up a breeze - the wrong wine brought twice, dull food weirdly presented, and the saltiest dumplings in Britain. I could have rattled a condescending review off in record time and had the afternoon to find somewhere else to hate while the comments racked up.

But you know what, there's been far too much Schadenfreude around these parts lately. I know bad meals make good reading but while I don't mind laying into a Jamie Oliver cash cow or cynical tourist dive, I am less comfortable with beating on yet another mediocre-but-hardly-disastrous meal from people whose intentions may well be misguided but hardly evil. Not everywhere can serve the best food or be incredible value, and it's far, far to easy to pick fault in somewhere that isn't perfect than it is to appreciate that actually, we have it pretty good most of the time. So, from now on, I'm going to try and be more positive.

Anyway, the reason I've been in such a conciliatory mood lately is largely due to a meal I had at the Dock Kitchen in West London earlier in the week, a special one-off event and the brainchild of Syrian/Lebanese food writer Anissa Helou with the assistance of Dock Kitchen chef Stevie Parle and his team. Ordinarily writing up one-off events is the least useful thing a food blog might do - it's not like anyone reading this will be able to book themselves in for similar any time soon - but this meal was just so ...unusual, that I thought it deserved a proper report. There are two points to be made before I go any further - firstly, the meal was titled 'Nose to tail lamb', and as you might expect contained bits of a sheep you wouldn't ordinarily see on a restaurant menu. If you are feeling a bit delicate and your idea of a difficult dish is a haggis, then look away now. Secondly, despite containing some of the most challenging items I've ever paid to eat, it was worth every penny even despite the fact there were some bits I will never ever go anywhere near again. Ever.

It all started innocently enough. Chicken wings, marinated I think in pomegranate molasses, were straight from the charcoal grill, salty and sweet crispy on the outside and silkily smooth within. The house bread also deserves a special mention, this presumably being Stevie Parle's work, with the soft, stretchy texture of the finest tandoor-cooked naans.

This is a lamb's tongue. It's not pretty, is it, but surely that's just a few decades of social conditioning talking - objectively it can't really be more obscene than a salami. It tasted salty and soft, not very offally in fact but rather like dense paté, and if you closed your eyes would almost pass as straightforward. Almost.

This roast potato contained a whole kidney seasoned with butter and thyme, and I was on safer ground here as I'd had kidneys in the past. Admittedly, I didn't like them much when I had them before - it was in Canteen in Spitalfields and I remember them tasting like, well, for want of a better word, like piss... actual piss - but here they were much more palatable, soft and meaty and with no unpleasant urine tang, just a vaguely musky tinge of innards.

Finally, our favourite of the starters - another soft and crisp flatbread topped with lamb's fry (liver), sweetbreads and kidneys, and chicken hearts and livers. All delicately spiced (allspice, I think) and perfectly seasoned, this Mixed Organ Grill was great fun to pick your way through - my favourites, as in the past, were the chewy chicken hearts and the creamy blobs of sweetbread. It was enough to forget I was working my way through minor lamb glands and let my guard down. Big mistake.

"Tandoori sheep's head interlude" sounds like a good name for a band, but is actually, as you can see from the X-rated photo above, an actual entire sheep's head, eyes and brains included, on a plate. To eat. Anissa gave a brief demonstration on how to *gulp* split the skull, *wince* scoop out the eyes and *aargh* fish out the brains with our fingers, during which I attempted to appear polite and pay as much attention as possible whilst simultaneously fighting the instinct to run out of the room screaming. Since a humbling trip to Japan earlier in the year, involving raw squid and cod's sperm, I no longer consider myself the brave Mr. Mange-Tout I once did, but even so, I surprised myself at how unnerved I was, staring into the dark, sunken eye sockets of a roast animal skull.

I first tried some cheek - "hmm, not bad" - then graduated to a teeny morsel of brain - "eek, well, OK" - but it was really the eyeball that I was most worried about. I stared at my dinner, and it stared back. I took a few deep breaths and, as instructed, sliced off the dark iris with a knife and fork. The two sections wobbled apart looking like nothing that should ever be eaten. I should say that my friend, much more brave and level-headed than me, was tucking into her side of the head with gusto - not only did she pop the entire eyeball into her mouth as if it was nothing more offensive than a marshmallow, but she also ate most of the tongue and was tearing at the brain with her fingers for as long as the front of house left it on the table. Eventually, under extreme peer pressure I should add, I tried a tiny bit of the eyeball. It tasted like salty lamb blubber, perhaps very slightly less hideous than I'd expected but still not enough to get me rushing to my nearest halal butchers and buying them out of whole carcasses.

After that, a whole stuffed stomach was almost prosaic. Gently pungent tripe, ballooned with spiced rice and herbs, sat in a clear vegetable broth containing garlic and lemon and crispy asparagus. I can't decide whether it was over-eating or shell-shock but I'm afraid I couldn't manage more than half of it. Very tasty though, I assure you.

Rose water sorbet and Lebanese wild orchid root ice cream provided some kind of light relief at the end of the meal. I ate them feeling like I'd just been bungee jumping, or white water rafting - a combination of having broken some personal limits and delighted I'd even eaten as much as I did. And yes, I struggled with some bits of the meal, as I imagine many others would too, but I can't remember the last time I've finished a meal feeling such a sense of a achievement - pathetic really, as there must be people all over the Middle East tucking into a whole sheep's head like you or I might a Cornish pasty.

So, thank you to Anissa and Stevie for having the balls (which reminds me, I guess it could have been worse) to do this, and for treating me and my friend to a completely hilarious, terrifying, delicious and utterly unforgettable evening. I'm never going to be the world's biggest fan of the strange collection of objects that lurk inside a sheep's skull, but by cooking it all so well - always delicately spiced and perfectly seasoned, not a single mistake in any element of any course - they have at least convinced me that this is as good as this stuff gets, and I can safely now stop trying. And I can't tell you how much of a relief that is.

Edit: Apparently lamb's fry were testicles after all, not liver. So I did better than I thought.